Posts Tagged ‘0% credit card’

I just filled out the WaMu cc paysmart invoice. Man! I felt like a dinosaur was about to rip my roof off and possibly eat me alive. What does that mean? Washington mutual’s credit card autopayment signup protocol is so archaic. I started the process days ago which was wasting my energy as I kept watching for late payments etc. I finally got it and I had to write out a voided check – who does that anymore?

I must admit even though I seemed to switch everything from bank of America (BofA checking and savings), wamu’s customer service sucks big time. First of all, I couldn’t open a savings account because of those stupid questions on their site for verification. Then I didn’t get a debit card for 6 months. I emailed them about every month and never received a reply. I called them and they said it would be in within 10 days and it never showed up. Then I called again and finally I got the card. However, their products are awesome – free checking and checks for life; nearly 5% savings – which is why I’m with them. I have no idea how they got JD Power and Associates Best Customer Service award. I would write to JD if they screwed me over, but their in house customer service is very nice. I like them a lot. I actually look forward to going to the bank. But come on WaMu cc – this is the 21st Century AD, not BC.

Nickling and DimingI signed up for a few get paid for research sites such as pinecone.com as I’m totally broke. I’ve been really stressing lately. I had to buy a ticket for a domestic airline as my father is not doing too well. I did put it on my swa cc so I can get something in return. However, even bigger is the trip my wife and I are planning to go see her parents. She hasn’t seen them in nearly a decade, so again we can’t put a price on that, but it is going to hurt. I was going to try and make some money before we go, but it doesn’t look likely now. It’s an international flight which will set us back about $1500 each and we have to pay for our expenses here as well. Anyway, this is going to kill me. That’s why I’ve been trying to work harder on the blogs, but I feel so unfocused (I started another blog idea – not sure if I’m going to do it or not, but we’ll see).

9:16 PM – I took a deep breath and put in my passwords for mint.com. I got a rejection notice from a blogging job I applied to, so I used that as fuel to get my finances in order and overcome the fear of putting all my financial passwords into one site. So far, I’ve had problems establishing connections with my hsbc and chase credit cards, and hsbc savings.

I’ve been waiting and waiting for the hsbc to do a balance transfer. Currently, I’m still spending about $90/mo ($1084/yr) for the $6.7K that’s sitting in my bofa at 16%. I’m trying transfer about $3300 of it to my usaa at 13%. Ideally I’m trying to get all of the bofa balance to zero and then put it back on at 4.99% for the life of the debt. It’s still a little too high for me as I want my savings account to beat it, but it blows away most of the people’s interest rates. I’m not jumping on the usaa transfer as I’m hoping that the wamu card2 will be accepted and hsbc transfer will happen (initiated 1/4/08) asap so then I will reduce the number of balance transfer fees (3%). But I’ll still need to transfer some to my usaa eventually after these two as they are only giving about $2.5K credit limit each. I will try and call usaa cc to transfer some over now.

10:20 PM – I signed up for mint.com and it is ok. Not as great as I thought. I guess it’s because not all my accounts are in there, so I feel like I can’t “see” everything as once.

I was hesistant the other day to put purchases on my SWA credit card because I didn’t want to go back into a credit card debt. So I put a few things on there (gas, groceries,etc) and immediately paid it from my checking account. Now that I got a lot of the 16% debt down (see previous blog), I am aggressively putting all my bills on there and including my wife’s bills so I can get free airline tickets. Basically, I gotta spend $16K/year to a free ticket. Which is basically a 2.5% return on purchases. I valued the ticket at $400 because of the flexibility.

This is in essense passive income because I’m spending the same amount as I would have otherwise, but now I’m getting something back.

Today was a breakthrough that gave me a little bit of piece of mind. I was supposed to pay about $350 tomorrow for my Bofa CC which had about $9K on it. I missed the payment last time and it knocked me back a bit mentally. But they went from $135/mo to nearly $400. I paid $130 a few days back which they vollied back to me with a 5 extra day grace period, but was still insistent on the full amount. I started my hsbc card a few days back along with my 2nd wamu and 2nd chase cards. Then the hsbc card came in the mail approved (0% til 12/08)! Then I logged onto the bofa acct and about $2400 was paid from my wamu 1 cc. So the nervousness about that amount instantly vanished. The balanced dropped down to about $6K. Then transferred another $2.5K to my hsbc which should go through w/in a week or so. So interest per year went from $1800 to $1400 (monthly: $156 to $121) on just the 16%. I’ve got 2 more pending cards with 0% hopfully approving soon. I’m assuming that together it’ll be about $5K.

So then I will transfer the remaining bofa debt to the $4.7K debt on the usaa (limit $13K) and then transfer all that back to the bofa at 5% for the life of the debt. Then that will be my highest interest rate. Not bad eh. It all happened within one month. Well, not really, as I spent the whole year making sure I paid my cc’s on time which allowed my fico score to go up by 100 points. That allowed me to get the 0%s. My debt ratio is about 40%. If my second wamu card comes through, then I’ll use it for my checking overdraft and not really put anything on there.

Also, I told my wife that I will transfer her 18% over to one of my 0% cards, but that doesn’t look possible right now. I can put it on my 5% card in about a month.

I can’t believe that this is just a simple game of chess. Not at all like playing Kasparov.